His Face Set For The Heavens

From a series of Neil Armstrong photos posted by the National Archives
Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

Nixon And The Intensity Gap

Historian and former Nixon tapes archivist Maarja Krusten gets props from OC Weekly's Matt Coker for her recent article about Nixon foundation efforts to get rid of library director Tim Naftali:

Krusten ends her piece not by taking pot shots at the Nixon loyalists--her entire account is pretty matter-of-fact and snark-free--but she does take a swipe at others in her profession.

"Historians need to step up their game," she writes. "They need to embrace continual learning and educate themselves about the National Archives and what it faces in Washington. As it is, there is what Naftali calls an intensity gap. The Nixon side showed intense interest in the Watergate exhibit and used various means in an unsuccessful effort to limit it.

"This time around, knowledgeable Washington insiders such as I had Tim's back. Who will fight for the next Tim Naftali, if complacency among historians on presidential libraries issues continues?"

Missing Footnotes To History

In a History News Network post, historian and blogger Maarja Krusten accuses historians of complacency because of their inattentiveness to the slings and arrows hurled at former Nixon library director Tim Naftali by Bob Haldeman's operatives.

He Put A Donut In Our Tea Party

My blogging buddy Maarja Krusten, historian and former Nixon tapes archivist, says David Ferriero is the coolest archivist of the U.S. in history. Here's proof: He recently hosted a jelly-filled replay of the War of 1812, pitting great American donuts Dunkin' and Krispy Kreme against Canada's Tim Hortons.

Don't be comfited by the U.S.'s home town advantage. We frittered it away yet again. We didn't get Canada after winning the war (we probably should have; just sayin'), and now Tim Hortons has won the great taste test -- oddly enough, since the U.S. judges outnumbered Canada's two to one, literally. That really sticks in my cruller.

But donut holes are better than canon balls anytime, especially when the AOTUS capped the evening by screening his favorite movie, "Strange Brew." Ask most intellectuals to name their pick flick, and they'll say "Rashomon" or "Richard III." As inflexible, impractical, unimaginative ideology squeezes more and more joy out of our civic life (like if you dropped a phone book on a Boston cream), it's a blessing when top officials dare to be cheesy.

Still, I want a rematch. How about you? As Lady Gaga might say, show your bear claws, little monsters.

Anna Another Thing On Watergate

Ken Hughes argues that Richard Nixon ordered a break-in at the Brookings Institution in 1971 not because of his rage over the leak of the Pentagon Papers during wartime, as I've always contended, but because he was worried about what his political opponents might've known about his effort to torpedo the Johnson administration's Vietnam peace process.

The Brookings break-in never occurred. Still, Hughes asserts somewhat dramatically that if the House Judiciary Committee had known about the Brookings tape segment in 1974, and it had led investigators to the Anna Chennault file (she told the South Vietnam they'd get a better deal under Nixon), the articles of impeachment drawn up against Nixon might have included treason (based on the law against private citizens interfering with official U.S. diplomacy).

Hughes says there's no evidence that presidential politics were behind Lyndon Johnson's ordering a bombing halt in Vietnam a few days before the 1968 election, when Nixon was running against Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey. About this, Nixon's advocates beg to differ -- for example, Conrad Black:

[P]erhaps the all-time nadir in American presidential-election ethics was achieved in 1968, when Lyndon Johnson tried to salvage the election for his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, with a completely imaginary claim of a peace breakthrough in the Vietnam talks a few days before the election. LBJ announced an enhanced bombing halt and more intensive talks in which the Viet Cong and the Saigon government would be “free to participate” (i.e., Saigon declined to attend since there had been no breakthrough).

So who did worse playing politics with war: The candidate or commander-in-chief?

Maarja Krusten reflects on Hughes' startling allegations here.

The Charlottesville Massacre (Almost)

In an April 30 talk at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, where he worked for eight years before I recommended him as the first federal Nixon library director, Tim Naftali revealed that over cocktails in Charlottesville, Virginia one evening in June 2010, Reagan library director Duke Blackwood (left) and Naftali's boss, assistant archivist of the U.S. Sharon Fawcett (below), demanded his resignation -- as a sop, Naftali said they claimed, to loyalists of disgraced Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman:

If I would resign, I would get my [Watergate] exhibit....They wanted to give my head to the archivist of the United States on a platter...[Then] maybe the Nixonians would stop pushing. I thought this was outrageous...[They said,] "Tim, this is the only way your Watergate exhibit is going to happen. You've got to resign."...I didn't, of course.

Beginning in the fall of 2009, Richard Nixon and Haldeman's lower-level, non-policy operatives had been waging a ruthless campaign to stop Naftali's Watergate exhibit at all costs. They failed. The National Archives opened the exhibit in March 2011, generating the most publicity for the Nixon library since it opened 22 years ago. But there's no question that it was a close call for Naftali, since, as he tells it, his bosses at the Archives were at war with one another over how to handle the demands of Haldeman's operatives. That Blackwood was essentially carrying the Watergate for them is especially significant since he's a federal official who is paid a six-figure salary by U.S. taxpayers -- just like the Nixon factotum-turned-U.S. senator, Lamar Alexander, who also had Naftali in his sights, at the behest of one of Nixon's advance men.

Why roll out all that firepower? According to Naftali, the Haldeman tribe wanted to perpetuate the Watergate coverup by keeping the public from seeing videotape in which operatives such as Fred Malek discussed counting Jews in the federal government and Dwight Chapin, jailed for Watergate-related crimes, accused Nixon of being present when 1972's campaign dirty tricks were launched. "They were defending themselves," Naftali said of those who had taken control of the Nixon foundation. "It was no longer about the president."

Naftali knew he would have been crazy to submit to Blackwood and Fawcett (a colorful account of Blackwood's maneuver was first published, without his name attached, by historian and blogger Maarja Krusten). Later events revealed by Naftali in his hour-long Miller Center talk made clear that some at the National Archives (presumably including Fawcett, or so Naftali implies) were willing to replace his Watergate text with an outline dictated by the foundation's Watergate truth squad, of which perjurer Chapin was the most notable member. If Naftali had quit, it's a good bet that the custodians of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, faithfully preserved all these centuries, would have shredded his exhibit before the ink dried on his severance check.

Instead, the archivist of the U.S., David Ferriero, ultimately and unmistakeably backed Naftali. Fawcett announced her own resignation and reportedly received a consultancy offer from Haldeman's men. Based on Naftali's public comments, many questions remain about her role. Why did Fawcett need Blackwood's help in trying to axe Naftali? Did Ferriero know she was using one of his library directors to leverage the ouster of another (some NARA observers are certain that she acted on her own authority)? Did Fawcett, a canny civil service lifer, really think the scholarly community would've stood by while she greased the skids for a widely respected Cold War historian for the sake of the reputations of Bob Haldeman, Fred Malek, and Dwight Chapin?

Whether we learn the answers to any of these questions, Naftali's triumphant if emotionally charged presentation at the Miller Center proves that the dictum about history being written by the winners also applies to scrappy public historians who defeat shadowy private interests. The library director with nine lives even scores a late hit on his would-be executioner by critiquing the Reagan-adoring federal museum in Simi Valley, California, which in 2011 finally added a full exhibit on the Iran-contra scandal. That effort doesn't impress the curator of the Nixon library's warts-and-all-gate. "'Mistakes were made'; passive voice," Naftali said, summing up Blackwood and his colleagues' handiwork on the Reagan scandal, which some argued was worse than Watergate. "Reminds me of Pravda."

Friendly Fire

Tim Naftali, the former director of the Nixon library, has enough of secular outlook that he didn't know (or perhaps jokingly claimed not to) that he had inherited his surname from one of Jacob's fractious sons. Still, his Yorba Linda years comprised a wilderness experience of Hebrew Testament proportions. As he sometimes reminded me, I was the one who first beckoned him into the trackless wastes. I also helped give him his toughest challenge: Replacing the private library's relentlessly pro-Nixon Watergate exhibit. I'm sorry about the times I made his work unnecessarily difficult and grateful that he beat disgraced Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman's boys and finished what history had called him to do.

No public historian since the Enola Gay controversy at the Smithsonian Institution had a harder challenge. He was uniquely qualified for it. He was a highly regarded, non-ideological scholar of Nixon's defining crisis, the Cold War. A few years before he came to Yorba Linda, Tim and I had worked together a little on presidential tapes, by which Nixon's historical reputation is utterly bound and tied, for better and worse. Tim wasn't a Nixon booster, and I think he ended up deeply discouraged about Nixon's character as a result of his forced curatorial march through the Watergate swamp. Yet he and the last elected moderate Republican president would have disagreed on relatively few domestic or foreign policy issues. Perhaps most important given the odds he faced, he displayed the quality Nixon prized most of all. It turns out that Tim Naftali was tough as hell.

The archivist of the U.S., Allen Weinstein, was so excited by the idea of making Tim our first federal director (the library opened in 1990 as a private institution) that he offered him the job a few days after my call. When things were going well at the library, Weinstein would stress that Tim was his man. When things got rocky, he'd remind me that it had all been my idea. Tim and I labored together for over three years, rarely disagreeing about substance but having a series of pitched battles about Tim's independence vs. the Nixon foundation's right to be consulted on exhibits and programs, space use on our shared campus, and even Tim's lower-case library logo, which he thought invoked the '60s and '70s, when Nixon was president, but we thought unstatesmanlike.

We got important work done anyway. I permitted him to open foundation-owned records to scholars and funded his oral history interviews with Nixon policy heavyweights and White House operatives. Our disagreements never became public nor interfered materially with our shared mission of establishing the federal Nixon library as the successor of a private museum and archive that had earned something of a reputation of partisanship (which, if it was a fair criticism, was no one's fault but mine). Tim's bosses at the National Archives fully embraced the same mission -- Weinstein, of course, and his deputy Sharon Fawcett, who had both worked hard to bring Nixon's library in from the cold.

Having bargained with them for hundreds of hours to launch the federal library, Kathy O'Connor (shown here with Fawcett), Nixon's longtime aide and last chief of staff, and I would sometimes call or write Weinstein and Fawcett to complain about Tim. We never got anywhere. They backed him unequivocally. The most I could pry out of the avuncular Weinstein was his theory that Tim and I were brothers at heart who clashed because of unacknowledged similarities in temperament and outlook. After we each had stated our grievances, he would smile and send us back to Yorba Linda to work it out. While I never fully accepted that I was Dan to Tim's Naphtali, Kathy and I both loved Tim's mother, Marjorie, a delightful Anglican from his home town of Montreal (Tim's late father, a builder, was Jewish). One problem may have been that I was having trouble letting go after spending two decades planning and running the library. By the same token, we felt that Tim, in his actions and public statements, was trying too hard to put distance between himself and the ancien regime, namely us. We didn't become close until I left to begin full-time ministry in February 2009, which, now that I think about it, is often the way with siblings.

Thanks to Kathy, my able successor as head of the Nixon foundation, relations with Naftali and NARA quickly improved. But her journey toward the promised land of happier collaborations with our federal colleagues was interrupted and cruelly ended by the Haldeman renaissance. After Tim invited Nixon White House counsel John Dean to give a speech in June 2009, Nixon's White House and CREEP aides (including some involved in Watergate or Watergate-related activities) and their friends, thanks to enablers on the foundation board, surged to positions of influence or even fiduciary authority.

They were wrong about Dean's appearance, which was inevitable and also appropriate as part of the library's transition to public control. The self-described lynchpin of Watergate, he is pivotal historical figure. Tim and we had already played host to Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. Bob Woodward visited in 2011 without incident or controversy. The actions of Haldeman's acolytes weren't based on what was best for the library, the public, or Nixon's reputation. They lashed out because they despised Dean for helping send fellow operatives to jail for Watergate crimes and then grasped for power because they believed it was their right and their turn. As Naftali told the Los Angeles Times, "It's a very special tribe that has never accepted the nation's verdict on Watergate."

By the fall of 2009, Tim had been at work for two years on the library's new Watergate exhibit, which Weinstein and Fawcett had ordered him to undertake, also at my suggestion. It was part of complex deal in which the feds paid millions to build an archives wing for Nixon's vast collection and agreed to take over the library in May 2007 and move the records from College Park, Maryland. Shaking hands with our federal partners, we and the Nixon foundation board had promised both our acquiescence in an exhibit that would be acceptable to historians and in library-controlled public programming, including appearances by Nixon critics.

But once under the control of Haldeman's tribe, Nixon's foundation broke its promises. Most of their harsh if ultimately impotent actions are part of the public record. They denounced Naftali publicly for inviting Dean. An operative wrote on the foundation web site that he should go run a museum for traitor Alger Hiss. They recruited Sen. Lamar Alexander (right), a former Nixon aide, to put a secret hold on the nomination of a new U.S. archivist to pressure or get rid of Naftali. They assembled a Watergate truth squad including convicted perjurer Dwight Chapin and attacked Tim's Watergate exhibit draft, calling for friendlier treatment of Haldeman and trying to prevent the public from seeing videotape in which operatives discussed dirty tricks and counting Jews in the federal government. A former foundation employee who'd opposed the NARA handover wrote a column associating Tim with "the left." Another operative filed a FOIA request to read Tim's e-mails. Yet another accused him publicly of sending coded signals about his sexual orientation. His wife publicly accused Tim of leaking prejudicial Nixon tapes to the media.

When Tim offered one of Nixon's daughters a tour of the library's new quarters, she accepted only to denounce him in front of her fellow foundation leaders and demand that he leave. He was shocked that his adversaries had gone that far. As I had learned over a decade before, when Nixon put me instead of his family in charge of his estate, the withdrawal of the favor of political offspring is a powerful weapon. Lucky for Tim, it's not quite as potent when the taxpayers rather than the offspring are paying your salary. Though the massive assault on his professionalism and character must've been upsetting and sometimes dispiriting, it can't help but have reassured Tim that he was on the right track.

Besides, his colleagues at NARA must've had his back. Officials in Washington and around the country, especially at other libraries, had to be aware of what he was up against as he did the difficult job the archivist of the U.S. had given him. When all Nixon's men went to war against a federal director in the last battle of Watergate, the blue coats would obviously know where their loyalties belonged.

Not so much, astonishingly. At some point, the Weinstein-Fawcett hard line weakened. After the public learned of the Haldeman truth squad's critique in the late summer of 2010, there were signals from Washington that it was receiving a respectful review. That's right: The National Archives, custodian of documents signed by Thomas Jefferson, was paying serious attention to a Watergate narrative co-signed by Dwight Chapin.

And it gets worse. I remembered Weinstein and Fawcett's stony imperviousness to Kathy's and my minor complaints as I read historian Maarja Krusten's reference to Tim being cussed out not by a Haldeman operative or Nixon family member but by one of his fellow presidential library directors. Someone had figured out how to reach deep into the government and enlist a taxpayer-paid NARA official for a flanking attack on Tim Naftali. Which director was it? What was the official trying to accomplish? Was it part of an effort to get Naftali out of the Nixon library or alter the content of the Watergate exhibit? Did top NARA officials know about or sanction it?

It's hard to imagine Barack Obama's new archivist, David Ferriero, doing so, especially after the senior senator from Tennessee held up his nomination. Besides, I agree with Krusten that he's a stand-up dude. As for Fawcett, I'd always found her to be a straight shooter. But we know from press reports late last year that she'd sided against Naftali and that the Nixon foundation offered her a consultancy after her retirement. All the library directors, including the one who dissed Tim, had reported to her. It's also important to know if Haldeman's operatives played a role. In 2009, the Nixon foundation tried unsuccessfully to get the other presidential foundations to join it against Naftali. Lamar Alexander isn't the only current or recently serving government official with ties to the Haldeman clique.

However it happened, a federal official with a six-figure salary was carrying Watergate for Nixon's men. Maybe this inside move against Naftali was just further proof (as if it were needed) of the wisdom of the scriptwriter who put the words "follow the money" in Watergate leaker Mark Felt's mouth in "All the President's Men." Krusten writes that the director told Naftali, "You're going to ruin it for the rest of us." Perhaps he was speaking on behalf of cash-strapped presidential libraries from Simi Valley to Boston, where private foundation money can still buy a considerable amount of hagiography for the entertainment of credulous museum-goers. Too many balanced and thorough museum exhibits -- torture, Monica Lewinsky, Iran-contra -- and the gravy train might dry up as ex-presidents' rich friends tire of underwriting an undesirable degree of objectivity. For creating (and in March 2011 successfully opening) the Watergate exhibit that his bosses and historians had demanded and that the public deserved instead of the one Dwight Chapin wanted, Tim Naftali had become the ultimate skunk in the Rose Garden.

Who's The Expletive-Deleted Library Director?

During 2010-11, Nixon library director Tim Naftali was under relentless pressure over the Watergate exhibit that his bosses at the National Archives had ordered him to design and install. We know about the secret maneuvers by Nixon and Bob Haldeman operatives such as Sen. Lamar Alexander and the Watergate truth squad that included perjurer Dwight Chapin. Now historian and former Nixon archivist Maarja Krusten reports that a taxpayer-paid presidential library director got into the act and actually cussed Naftali out. Krusten says the event occurred in the last couple of years. I wonder if this publicly accountable official was representing the get-Naftali mission of the Haldeman clique and, if so, why.

Tweet Emotion

Thanks to sister blogger Maarja Krusten at NixoNARA for tweeting about my post on the handover of the Nixon library, which was picked up by Kate Theimer's Archivists-On-Twitter Daily.

An Historian Errs On The Nixon Library

Former Nixon archivist Maarja Krusten raises questions about historian Benjamin Hufbauer's review in a scholarly journal of the Nixon library's Watergate exhibit, particularly the transfer of the private library to the National Archives. We first tried to get the library into NARA in 1995-6, not 2005, as Hufbauer writes. This passage in his review is especially egregious:

[M]embers of the foundation thought they could still have a shrine to Nixon but have the government pay for it. They were wrong. In 2006 when NARA took over, the newly installed Archivist of the United States, Allen Weinstein, personally recruited Timothy Naftali to be the first director of the Nixon Library under federal management. Naftali and Weinstein agreed that the primary goal for the museum would be a detailed and historically accurate account of the Watergate events.

It is Hufbauer who is wrong. As library director and Richard Nixon's co-executor, I conducted the negotiations with NARA along with Kathy O'Connor, Nixon's last chief of staff. Before the handover, we agreed that the Watergate exhibit would be replaced. For the first federal director, I recommended one name to deputy archivist Sharon Fawcett: Tim Naftali, Cold War historian and presidential tapes expert. Within days, she'd placed a call inviting him to be considered. Archivist Allen Weinstein told me later that my idea had been brilliant and that the same notion "had occurred to me."

After Naftali was named, I suggested to Fawcett and Weinstein, and they agreed, that Naftali should redo the Watergate exhibit rather than our trying to design one that would be acceptable to the government. Before NARA had even taken possession of the museum, Natftali asked my permission to tear out the old exhibit, which I granted.

Hufbauer's account was apparently informed solely by the Bob Haldeman revanchists who took over Nixon's foundation in the fall of 2009 after Naftali invited John Dean to give a speech (see here, here, and here), who battled him relentlessly over the Watergate exhibit, but who had no involvement in the handover negotiations with NARA.

Thanks to my sister blogger Maarja for sending me the article.

Photos: Nixon library handover ceremony, 2007: (f) Foundation chairman Don Bendetti and Archivist of the U.S. Weinstein; (b) Fawcett, Taylor, Naftali, and O'Connor. Right: Naftali and O'Connor

Don't Mind The Gap

Eighteen-and-a-half has a powerful resonance for Americans who are at least two score and 18, since it's the length, in minutes, of a mysterious deletion in a Nixon White House tape that became part of the Watergate story. The volunteer sound technician at St. John's Episcopal Church, Dale Griffith, tells me my sermons average about that length -- a bit long for a highly liturgical service such as ours. While their political affiliations are naturally varied, the people of God at St. John's are gracious about my Nixon antecedents. But they probably sometimes wish that I would perform a deliberate erasure of a portion of these long, one-sided conversations, and do it beforehand.

The magic number came up again this week when historian and former Nixon archivist Maarja Krusten, a member of the National Archives foundation, attended an event at NARA in Washington featuring historical novelist Max Byrd and Cokie Roberts, the ABC News commentator who gave a talk about First Of Hearts: Selected Letters Of Mrs. Henry Adams, for which she wrote the introduction. As Krusten wrote at her blog NixoNARA:

As Bruce Guthrie’s photo shows, I was thrilled at the chance to tell Ms. Roberts that I was a member of the Foundation and how much I enjoyed and appreciated the wonderful work it does in partnership with the National Archives. Max Byrd and I exchanged some joking comments. When I told him I was a former NARA archivist who once worked with the Nixon tapes, he asked if he should tear out 18-1/2 pages from the book. I laughed and said, “No, no, we at the National Archives are all about preservation and disclosure. Gotta have the whole book!”

Turning On The Fawcetts

This morning historian and blogger Maarja Krusten writes:

John Fawcett retired in 1994 and became an archival consultant. NARA staff told me in the 1990s that he was advising the Nixon Foundation at one point but I only have anecdotal evidence of that. (I know John Taylor worked with Fawcett. I’ll have to ask John if this occurred in the form of a consultancy in addition to Fawcett having worked at NARA.) I thought of that, when I read [journalist Andrew] Gumbel state that the Nixon Foundation offered Sharon Fawcett a consultancy after she retired from NARA late this spring. Interesting echo, perhaps. Given the wording in Gumbel’s article, I don’t know if Sharon actually accepted the offer.

John and Sharon used to be married. John finished his long National Archives career at the beginning of the Clinton administration. His last post was assistant archivist for presidential libraries. Sharon served in the same capacity for many years and retired earlier this year. Both ended up being offered consultancies by the private Nixon foundation. Krusten is struck by the symmetry. I don't blame her.

Despite their considerable influence across many years over how White House records are handled, they've managed to stay more or less below the radar. Though she's shown here with Bill Clinton, most of Sharon's Internet hits are consequences of the Nixon wars. A cursory Google search reveals no photos of John.

To answer Krusten's question, in the early 2000s, when I was Nixon foundation chief, I hired John (by then retired from NARA, where he helped engineer a curious, brief tilt to Nixon) as we prepared for the handover of the private Nixon library to the National Archives. Since 1991, our private reading room and archives had been operated by Susan Naulty. She was doggedly opposed to making the Nixon library part of NARA and later became a critic of director Tim Naftali, associating him with the left for inviting former White House counsel John Dean to Yorba Linda. Years before, during the battle between the Nixon foundation and Tricia Cox over the $19 million bequest of Nixon buddy Bebe Rebozo, Naulty developed a unwonted media profile by discussing the size of her staff with the Los Angeles Times. Her comments dovetailed with attacks by Cox ally Irv Gellman, who claimed that the library was poorly managed because we didn't give Naulty more resources. Gellman, Naulty, and her assistant had worked together closely when he was researching his book The Contender.

When we'd settled our lawsuit against Cox and Rebozo's money was safely ensconced in our endowment, we began to focus on facilitating a government handover. The headline on an earlier post reflects our midset: "Take My Library. Please." I became more curious about the differences between Naulty and NARA practice. Would we be able to stretch our resources further if she stopped refusing to use computers and processing records document by document, typing up one or more index cards for each letter, telegram, or memo (yes, Virginia, we had a card catalog)? The government processed folder by folder. So I invited John Fawcett, then working as an archival consultant, to take a look. He concluded that it would take Naulty hundreds of years to finish preparing our small cache of Nixon's pre-presidential records for scholars. When I hired a former Reagan library archivist to oversee a transition toward NARA practice, Naulty quit.

We don't know anything about the consultancy those now controlling Nixon's foundation have reportedly offered Sharon Fawcett. She and I agreed in 2006 that Naftali should redo the library's Watergate exhibit. I'm curious (and no doubt Krusten is as well) about why in 2010 she, as a top National Archives official, seems to have sided against Naftali in favor of the Nixon-turned-Haldeman foundation and a Watergate truth panel that included perjurer Dwight Chapin. As for John Fawcett, ironically enough, back in the day he helped the Nixon foundation nudge a little closer to National Archives practice and procedure.

Separating The Woman From The Boys

Journalist Andrew Gumbel has published an article about the last battle of Watergate: Impotent efforts by aging acolytes of disgraced Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman to chase off Nixon library director Tim Naftali before he could install a new Watergate gallery. Importantly, Gumbel reveals what happened after I left my job as Nixon foundation chief in February 2009 and was replaced by Richard Nixon's longtime aide and last chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor. Among her first (and last) challenges was managing the outrage of Haldeman's minions over Naftali's speaking invitation to former White House counsel John Dean in June 2009:

She established a more fruitful working relationship with Naftali, but quickly met a wall of resistance from some at the foundation because she expressed understanding for the Dean invitation. Naftali said she was called a “wimp” in a meeting he attended and effectively frozen out by her foundation colleagues.

That sounds just like the Haldeman boys' name-calling. But she's nobody's wimp. Instead, she was encountering the Watergate generation at their weakest and angriest. To Kathy, Dean was an inevitable if ill-timed choice as a speaker at the newly federalized library -- a major historical figure, after all, thanks to his pivotal Watergate testimony. But to those who soon seized control of Nixon's foundation, he was a rat who had helped send their buddies to jail for their Watergate crimes. One operative's wife complained on the foundation web site about how hard the criminal investigations and trials had been on the defendants and proclaimed that perjury wasn't even a crime -- pleasing news, one imagines, to Dwight Chapin, newly influential at the foundation, who was among those who did federal time for perjury. He's shown here telling Naftali in an oral history interview that Nixon was in on the 1972 campaign's dirty tricks from the very beginning.

Kathy went to work for Nixon six years after his resignation and was holding his hand when he died 14 years later in April 1994. It's true she hadn't been with the old man in the White House when it really counted, as Watergate-era veterans often grumbled. By the same token, she hadn't organized any dirty tricks, ordered any burglaries, participated in any coverups, counted any Jews in federal agencies, or sicced the FBI on any journalists. As a result, her focus was on the old man's peacemaking legacy, not his aides' spotty reputations. Besides, over the years a few of them had kept scheming. Kathy and I were frequently pressured to get Nixon's campaign and non-policy aides more involved. The Nixon foundation had plenty of involvement with highly-respected heavyweights such as Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Jim Schlesinger, and Pete Wilson. But we'd spent too much time protecting Nixon and his library from certain lower-level elements of the so-called old guard to be enthusiastic about letting them near the safe in Yorba Linda.

As Gumbel suggests, Kathy's advocacy of a mature response to the Dean invitation presented an opportunity for Nixonian payback. An operative publicly denounced Dean for being disgraced and disbarred, failing perhaps to recall that the same could be said of the library's namesake. Soon Kathy's career of distinguished, confidential service to 37 and his fractious family was drowned in a post-Watergate gusher of twilight testosterone as the good old boys massed in Yorba Linda. Ironically enough, Naftali's decision to commemorate the 37th anniversary of the Watergate break-in with a visit from Dean helped transform the Nixon foundation into the Haldeman foundation. A key if unwitting player in this process was a socially ambitious Orange County printer then serving as the foundation chairman who quit in a huff in 2010 after the operatives spurned his bid for a new, jumbo-salary foundation "president" job.

Their first move against Naftali was the secret enlistment of powerful friends in Washington to get him fired, but the wiry youngster from Quebec outmaneuvered the lumbering veterans. Then they assembled a truth squad featuring perjurer Chapin and tried to force the feds to water down the Watergate exhibit. In this effort, Andrew Gumbel and others report, they won key support from Sharon Fawcett, the National Archives official in charge of presidential libraries. Gumbel reveals that the archivist of the U.S., David Ferriero (a stand-up dude, as historian and blogger Maarja Krusten might say), sided with Naftali against Fawcett, who quickly retired and was offered a consultancy by Haldeman's operatives.

We need more details about how they won Fawcett (shown here with Kathy in happier times, at a Nixon Center dinner). If her pivot had worked, Naftali would have been finished. Instead, he finished the work he was called to do: Establishing the Nixon library as an equal partner among other presidential libraries by moving Nixon’s records home to Yorba Linda and installing a Watergate exhibit that would pass muster with the scholarly community. In that accomplishment, Kathy O'Connor, who had served Nixon best of all by being tough enough to protect him and his library from more than one scheme and embarrassment, shares considerable credit.

Bending Notes And The Constitution

Before I was a frustrated pianist, I came to George Gershwin's thrilling jazz concerto, "Rhapsody in Blue," as an underachieving 11-year-old clarinetist. The piece begins with an almost impossible to believe two and a half-octave clarinet glissando blasting off from the F below middle C and bending slowly, in an aching blue note, toward a high B-flat. I can bend notes on an harmonica, but I never developed the embouchure of iron required to do it on the clarinet. I wish I'd practiced more.

I also wish I could say I'd heard it performed by my teacher, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's first-chair clarinetist, Vincent Melidon, a buddy of my father the music critic. I still have the old B-flat Selmer Mr. Melidon sold my mother, but unfortunately the only thing that rubbed off on me was cork grease. Besides, if he ever played the Gershwin run during his DSO years, it probably wasn't on my instrument, since he would've used an A clarinet for his orchestral work.

Instead, I listened over and over again to the 1959 recording by the Columbia Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein, who also played piano. And of course "Rhapsody" is all about the ivories, not the licorice stick. The story goes that Gershwin hadn't finished writing portions of the piece for its first performance, with a jazz band, in Boston in 1924, so he improvised. It's now a staple of the classical repertoire.

While the Bernstein performance will be in my head forever, I also love the two associated with Woody Allen's 1979 film "Manhattan," Gary Graffman's on the soundtrack album and Paul Jacobs' in the film itself. The movie's titles, featuring Jacobs' and conductor Zubin Mehta's "Rhapsody" plus black and white images of the streets of the city, Central Park, Yankee Stadium, and fireworks over the East River, are exquisite; pretty much the high point of the movie. You can also get performances of the piece for solo piano, including this one by French pianist Vera Tsybakov.

Gershwin said the work's rhythms were inspired by the clickety-clack of New York's subways and ELs. Thanks to a church friend, I had the chance to rhapsodize about "Rhapsody" to my Bronx-born wife, Kathy, before, during, and after a June performance by Orange County's Pacific Symphony and pianist Orion Weiss, whose rendering was as lyrical and modern as Bernstein's was muscularly classical.

Thumbing through the program before the concert, I was startled by another contrast, not between an old pianist and a young one but an old Nixon hand and his younger self. The program contained an interview with Nixon operative Larry Higby (above), now chairman of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, which includes the Pacific Symphony's home, the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. The article, which didn't mention Higby's Nixon service, contained this statement by the impresario:

The arts are for all of us. They enrich our lives and add meaning and dimension to our daily experiences.

True enough, now and in 1971, when Higby was adjutant to Richard Nixon's soon-to-be-disgraced chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. But back then, in the midst of the Vietnam war, the only artistic meaning and dimension the White House cared about was whether the artist in question was pro or con. As documented in the Nixon library's new Watergate gallery and the on-line background available at the library's web site, Higby asked the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover to provide dirt about CBS's Daniel Schorr, participated in the notorious Jew-counting scandal, and facilitated the process by which counsel John Dean's enemies list made its way to a desk within a few feet of the Oval Office. Among other great and decent Americans enriching and adding meaning to our lives in that era and yet ending up on the enemies list assembled for the president of the United States was none other than Leonard Bernstein.

In a thoughtful post earlier this summer at NixoNARA, historian Maarja Krusten reflected on Nixon and Haldeman's practice of hiring young men as aides. It was true that they were energetic and eager to please, and they looked good. Haldeman's acolytes have often made a fetish of looking well-dressed and clean cut (though the last time I met the desperately ailing Haldeman, on the streets of Santa Barbara, he told me cheerfully that he'd never wear a tie again). But as Krusten relates, they lacked wisdom, as younger people sometimes do. That was probably the way Nixon and Haldeman wanted it. You tell an ambitious young man in a free nation to sic a federal police agency on a journalist, and he may actually do it. Nixon knew that older advisers were more likely to push back. Nixon's advocates often say that the enemies list was de minimis because no one on the list had his taxes audited, as Nixon vowed to do. That may be because when Nixon's boys tried to line up the IRS to harass his enemies, they encountered a man, Treasury secretary George Shultz (shown with Nixon), who told them to pound sand.

I served former President Nixon and, at his direction, his estate and presidential library for nearly 30 years; Kathy equaled that, for a total of 60 between us. I was his chief of staff from 1984-90. I admired him for his peacemaking achievements and relentless diligence as an elder statesman. But even in those quieter years, he had his weaker moments. One morning, sitting opposite me in his office in 26 Federal Plaza in New York City, he ordered a little dirty trick. Angry at a prominent journalist, he told me to send the person an anonymous note saying that "we" knew something embarrassing. I didn't do it, and I hoped he wouldn't mention it again, which he didn't. If he had, I pray that I would've done the right thing.

Kathy, who succeeded me as Nixon's chief aide and was holding his hand when he died in 1994, also saved him from a humiliating crisis or two by saying no. It wasn't easy. Once, she reports, he was speechless with anger. She was afraid he was about to fire her. She's tougher than I am, and she held her ground. I can imagine it was a lot harder when Nixon was powerful and his young men wanted to keep their West Wing offices.

My apologies to Vincent Melidon for calling him "the late" in an earlier iteration of this post, and my thanks to his nurse, who corrected my error in a gracious comment.

Moderately Overlooked

As historians such as Rick Perlstein and Sam Tanenhaus mull the rightward progression of the GOP and conservatism from the age of Nixon to the age of Beck and Hannity, historian Maarja Krusten starts with her mother, a Nixon fan right through Watergate's bitter end, especially because of his foreign policy. Today, she doesn't watch Fox News, and she reasons that you can't balance the budget without more revenue. Her daughter concludes:

Nixon was a moderate and a pragmatist. He was not a conservative. Nor were all his supporters. Did some Nixon voters later vote for Reagan and become Fox News fans? Absolutely. Yet there also were people such as my Mom. There’s a lot in the mix. As with all issues Nixonian, working through the motives and objectives requires discernment.

Among other things, one discerns that moderates are dissed, devalued, and demoted. We don't have a cable station. Few if any Republicans would dare utter the word "moderate" without swearing or spitting. At first blush, we indeed appear to be a dwindling tribe. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as moderates has fallen from 43% to 35% since 1992. During the same period, self-identified conservatives increased from 36% to 40%, while the liberals edged up from 17% to 21%. That means we've lost 4% each on both ends of the spectrum, a symptom, Gallup says, of our increasingly polarized politics.

But those numbers, while great news for Fox News' and MSNBC's ratings, aren't so great for the GOP's general election chances in 2012. Conservatives are prone to saying that moderates are really liberals. Spend three minutes on FreeRepublic, and you'll get the picture. Stipulating their point for the purposes of argument, that makes the U.S. electorate 56% (liberals plus moderates) to 40% conservatives. Nixon's oft-quoted dictum was that Republican candidates always had to scurry to the center to contend in general elections. This year, primary-season contenders will have had to spend so much time in birtherland and Obama-ignored-Easterland that reclaiming a sufficient share of the center back from the president may be impossible.

Redemption And Revenge

Historian Maarja Krusten reviews the recent Nixon wars.

Blogtente

"Nixon goes to China" was an unpredictable move. "Maarja goes to 'The New Nixon'" was a courageous one.

An Order Better Not Followed

According to notes kept by his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, on July 3, 1971 President Nixon let his suspicions about Jews and liberals in the civil service get the better of him. He believed they were purposely manipulating economic data to hurt his administration. Historian Maarja Krusten offers reflections on the politics of scapegoating (which comes from Torah, ironically enough -- Lev. 16:8,10):

The segment [of notes] covered Nixon’s directive to Haldeman to have [White House operative Fred] Malek [shown below] check “sensitive areas,” uncover “Jewish cells,” and to put a “non-Jew in charge of each.” Haldeman, who occasionally dragged his feet on orders from Nixon, didn’t blink an eye. And so the Nixon White House sent Fred Malek off to count Jewish civil servants.

Nixon may have been uncomfortable about some of the things recorded on his tapes or recorded in White House documents. I sympathize with that to some degree. His records were seized and the rules changed on him. But trying to take out the people at NARA who worked and still work with those materials only demonstrates the same acculturation that led Nixon and Haldeman to send Malek off to count Jews at BLS. Nixon didn’t like the way the bureau was handling the release of unemployment figures. Instead of directing James Hodgson, Secretary of Labor, to work through the timing issues, he went nuclear. And sent Malek off to do some things Malek and Haldeman should have resisted, in my view. This set up a situation where Malek later had to confront, or not, what he had done.

It was a classic example of not liking an outcome and personalizing the issue based on assumptions, rather than working out a rational and fact-based solution. Just like assuming Fred Graboske and his staff were biased against Nixon and trashing their reputations (“incompetent clerical level archivists.”). Or calling for Tim Naftali to find an Alger Hiss library to head, when he sought to put up an historically sound exhibit about “abuses of governmental power.” There couldn’t be a clearer demonstration of the management culture within the Nixon White House that resulted in those abuses than observing what NARA has faced since the 1980s.

Ankle-Deep In The Big Potomac

From historian Maarja Krusten, a thoughtful post on the aftermath of last week's Watergate exhibit opening at the Nixon library.

A Pearl Of A Story

When she was working with Richard Nixon's White House tapes and other materials at the National Archives during the 1980s, historian Maarja Krusten won several cash awards for outstanding service. She writes this morning:

With one award, I bought myself a pearl ring. Unfortunately, the pearl fell out of the setting while I was at work. It happened when I was working with some manuscript (Hollinger) boxes while the Nixon Project still was housed in Alexandria, Virginia. Maybe someday a researcher will open one of those gray boxes at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, and find it. An actual pearl to go along with the valuable nuggets of information in the expert care of Tim Naftali and his staff.